MarketPlace

Turning games into a great way of marketing products

games

NIC Bank branch in Nairobi. The lender turned to the gamification strategy to market its products last December. PHOTO | SALATON NJAU

Gamification marketing, a strategy that Kenyan brands are employing in a bid to create product awareness and encourage user engagement, could prove to be an essential element for brands to drive customer marketing and loyalty this year.

“The trend is on the rise, by 2015, 40 per cent of global 1,000 organisations will use it as the primary mechanism to transform business operations and in the coming years, gamification will be an essential element for brands and retailers to drive customer marketing and loyalty.

Companies will also use it in learning and/or recruitment processes,” according to a 2014 report titled Gamification Trends and Strategies to Help Prepare for the Future by global technology research firm Gartner.

The marketing strategy offers a fun way for brands to engage with their customers.

It brings out consumers’ desires for winning competitions, which gives an incentive to play the game, thus promoting consumer engagement, attracting new customers and creating product awareness. US company Mars used this strategy is to promote its M&M’s chocolate.

The company launched a game on its Facebook page in 2013 as part of its M&M’s pretzel marketing campaign.

The game was based on the eye spy logic, where its followers were presented with a large graphic design of its candy with one small pretzel hidden among them. The consumers were then asked to find the pretzel.

Finding the goat

The game boosted consumer engagement and it garnered over 25,000 new Facebook likes, while the post was shared more than 6,000 times online and received 10,000 comments.

It is this kind of response that NIC Bank Kenya was looking to generate with their Christmas giveaway promotion, #WinAMbuzi.

The lender, in December 2016, launched a game where its audience was tasked with finding “the goat” on a particular image. The added motivation in this case was the chance to win a goat, a popular dish for Kenyan families over the holidays.

Offering relatable rewards to audiences incites them to engage with the brand and participate in its game, in a strategy that can increase consumer engagement and brand awareness.

“When done well, gamification helps align a brand’s interests with the intrinsic motivations of its consumers , amplified with the mechanics and rewards that make them come in, bring friends and keep coming back,” said Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham in their book Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps.

“Only by carefully unpacking consumers’ emotions and desires can brands design something that really sticks and only through the power of gamification can they make that experience predictable, repeatable and financially rewarding.”

However, for the marketing strategy to work, the brand needs to make it competitively fun for their consumers so that they maintain interest and stay engaged with the brand’s game over the period it runs, and even when it is over.

“Momentum depends on sustained engagement. In gaming, momentum is achieved by balancing the difficulty of the challenges presented with the skill levels of the players.

‘‘If players find challenges too easy, they will soon get bored. On the other hand, if challenges are too difficult, players will become frustrated,” said Brian Burke, the research vice president at Gartner Research.

“When applying the gamification strategy brands need to engage consumers quickly and maintain their engagement through deft use of game mechanics such as challenges, rules, chance, rewards and levels,” he said.

- African Laughter